Thoreau had built himself a 10- by 15-foot cabin with secondhand lumber on shoreline property at Walden owned by Emerson. He had almost no money, but he had friends, by far the most valuable of whom was his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson. He had a degree from HarvardCollege, he had tried teaching and failed, and he possessed some skill in surveying. On the fourth of July, 1845, a month and a half after Sir John Franklin set out from London with the ships Erebus and Terror to find the Northwest Passage, Henry David Thoreau set out from the family home in Concord, Massachusetts, to take up residence at nearby Walden Pond to find himself. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
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